How We DO: Disgaea Intro

Welcome to How We DO, a blog series where Exelement and I discuss how we would design entries into our favorite game franchises (and then some). To see how these blogs are structured and how they work see the How We DO: A Brothers Project introduction.

Today's game:

Disgaea

My brothers and I have been fans of NIS and their SRPGs since we got a PS2. Phantom Brave, La Pucelle Tactics, Soul Nomad, Disgaea, and Makai Kingdoms are the reasons NIS and NISA are two of our favorite companies. Sadly, Disgaea is the only game of those that became a franchise.

I've personally spent 500 hours across just Disgaea 3 and 4, and easily another 200 hours across Disgaea DS, Disgaea 1, Disgaea 2, and Disgaea D2. It is my second most played franchise, behind only Pokemon, and as such, it is a franchise near and dear to my heart.

I don't stop with the story for the game. In fact, the story is my least favorite portion of the experience (not to be taken as a bad thing, the story is excellent). What I love about Disgaea is the post-game, and while I play the game I often wonder what I'd love to see in the franchise.

Before we get into how we would add to the Disgaea franchise, we'd like to discuss just what makes Disgaea so special and unique. There are what we consider the Core Values of the franchise:

Over-the-Top

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Prinny Staff: Every time we make one... a Prinny goes missing.

Disgaea is not a game that takes itself seriously, and it provides us with emotional moments despite that. It is a franchise filled with over-the-top moves, hilarious item descriptions, and memorably off characters.

Valvatorez is obsessed with sardines. The main character of Disgaea 3 is on a quest to kill his father after watching his video game console get stepped on. My mage in Disgaea D2 is wielding a staff with a prinny head.

And you want crazy moves? Look no further. You'll ride shark demons on tidal waves, create and army of clones to slam someone into the moon, and watch colossal magic creatures unleash barrages of fire, wind, and ice.

Customization

With dozens of classes to choose from, and multiple character-changing skills for each, and the ability to reincarnate to carry skills and abilities across classes, Disgaea ensures that everyone’s party will be different. And with stats able to grow to incredible heights, there is nothing holding the player back from going even more crazy. Do you want a mage who uses an axe and sucks at magic? Then level it that way. It will work, eventually.

Give your members whatever name you want. Have Tittysupreme pulverize your enemies, or command your close friends to kill each other. Make your Prinny gold. Or teal. Or black. Make your shark demon friends with your samurai. Put your warrior next to your archer in the classroom. Change your headquarters so that your allies get more bonuses than you thought possible.

Just a small taste of the many classes

And once you finished making your party, customize what music plays when. Then make some stages. Take a moment to change your save icon. Disgaea is all about having a personal experience, and hours upon hours can be spent planning your effectively level 180,000 team, if you want.

Forever

Every review mentions that you can reach level 9,999 in Disgaea. The game is famous for it. 9,999 is only the beginning. You can store over 180,000 levels through reincarnation, but there’s more than just that. You can max out all of your stat aptitudes (key to making your mage a top-tier axe user). You can unlock dozens of skills and level those skills through usage and mana. You can level all of your equipment through the 100-floor Item World, and then reverse-pirate that equipment to level it even further and unlock unique innocents. You can spend hours finding, combining, and duplicating those innocents.

You'll go from this...

And all the while, there are stages and bosses that will truly test your strategies, home base set-ups, and stats. And once you beat those, you can start working on X-dimension levels. You can find your way to the Land of Carnage, where you’ll find even greater enemies to face and train against. Once you have a perfect team, you can make another. You can spend hundreds more hours creating a team of 10 Prinnies named the Pringer Squad.

To put some things into perspective: I’ve played Disgaea 3 for 250 hours and have not reached the max number of stored levels. I also only have the 6th best weapons, none of which have maxed out levels. I’ve played Disgaea 4 for the same time and I can’t even leave my base panel against the mighty Tyrant Baal, let alone scrape his ridiculous health bar.

...to this!

One of the greatest parts of Disgaea is that no matter how far you go, you can still go further. What makes that all the better is the pacing of Disgaea. Through the story you'll grow like a normal JRPG (I finished Disgaea 2 with my main character at level 80). After that, you'll work towards level 100. And then level 1000. Eventually, you'll reach level 9999. Once you do, you'll be reaching that level again and again, faster than you ever thought possible (in Disgaea 4 I now reach that level in less than 10 minutes). One week you'll find yourself doing a hundred damage, only to be dealing hundreds of thousands the next week. Disgaea is easy to grind in because you can always see the improvement.

Puzzles

Geoblocks and towers are what truly separate Disgaea from any other SRPG. How do you make a game where you can just grind to insane stats mind-bending? By creating unique puzzles around geoblocks and towers that make those stats almost worthless. A part of the map just out of reach for your character to jump to? Create a tower of characters so that a raised character can throw someone up there.

Mighty enemy panels can protect Game Over panels that activate after a set number of turns, making it so that your throws and moves have to all count, even if you kill the enemies in one hit. Warp panels, invincibility panels, poison panels, bye bye panels, ally move panels… the problems you will face that aren’t opponents are endless. One of my favorite puzzles had me figure out the perfect order to kill the geoblocks, because if I didn’t I’d be left standing in a sea of Might Enemy panels (for those not in the know, those panels make everyone but you invincible).

I’ve often found myself simply looking at stages for dozens of minutes, wondering how to complete them. It’s not unusual to try X-dimension stages again and again, trying new moves each time. That sort of joy just isn’t something you get from other SRPGs.

These Core Values would be involved in every decision we'd make as directors for a Disgaea game.

That's it for today! Our next blog will cover the actual changes we would make to the Disgaea franchise. Look forward to it!